This is a proposal to analyze data, collected in the Institute for Social Research 1972, 1974, and 1976 national election surveys and a 1979 follow-up interview with a subset of female respondents from these earlier studies. Substantively the analysis applies reference group theory to the study of self identification with older people as a social category. Age group identification is defined as an attitudinal disposition characterized by an awareness of older people as a subculture and the perception of similarity or common interests with other older people. Four major objectives are addressed in the analyss: 1) To determine the major causes and consequences of age group identification among people sixty years of age and older. 2) To analyze longitudinal data that allows us to study the process of aging as a factor producing the development of age identification. 3) To ascertain, using a causal framework, if the absence of age identification among some older individuals results from the denial of aging or the presence of other factors such as competing (multiple) identification. 4) To discover if the politicization of age identification produces a positive set of attitudes and engagement in political or social activities among age group identifiers. The combination of both cross-sectional and panel desins make the data nearly unique for unravelling the causal dynamics underlying the development of age identification and subsequent attitudinal or behavioral consequences. Previous, studies of the correlates of age identification have rarely employed either multivariate or dynamic models. These studies were limited, therefore, because they reapportioned the same variance in the dependent measure with each new variable considered in the analysis. The proposed research aims to provide a more complete understanding of age identification by explicitly modeling the process of attitudinal and behavioral change.